Christie Kills State Plan – Rebrands Corporate Strategic Plan

Trenton – Governor Christie’s controversial version of NJ’s State Plan drew praise from a leader of a conservative think tank today, as the draft Plan was approved unanimously by the State Plan Development Committee.

At a Wednesday Trenton hearing, the State Plan Development Committee was briefed on the new Christie State Plan.

State planners were sent back to the drawing board, and a new plan was developed to reflect Christie Executive Orders (#1-4 and 78), based on Governor Christie’s Vision, Values, and Priorities.

The death of the State Plan at the hands of the Christie Administration was not unexpected, having been telegraphed at the outset in Transition reports and Executive Orders promoting economic development and relief from “job killing red tape”, Trenton bureaucracy, and “onerous regulations”.

The State Plan was long opposed by the business community and developers as a barrier to economic growth.

Yet the Plan’s promotion of growth in rural centers and its failure to map environmental features and enforce policies and standards to control growth led to criticism by environmentalists.

Indeed, former NJ Audubon Society Director of Conservation Bill Neil called the State Plan “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the people of NJ”. [Correction. I misquoted Bill Neil and left out prescient context. Neil’s correct 3/31/99 full quote: (see comments)

“Never before in the conservation history of this State have so many futile words and pages, and revisions of this futility, wasted so much of our citizens’ time, energy and hopes, and delivered so little”. So NJAS wants to distance itself from where the Plan stands today. We want to warn the citizens of New Jersey that they face more lost farms and forests, and more interminable legal battles in front of their local governments and state agencies, as evidenced by events in Hopewell, Pohatcong and Sparta Townships. They will continue to be stuck in traffic, face higher property tax bills, and witness the seemingly inevitable suburbanization of the State. We want to go on the record today, to state without equivocation that what is in this Plan won’t work, can’t work and is one of the greatest policy illusions ever visited upon the public in New Jersey.”

“NJ must celebrate, publicize, and market these impressive results that flow from Republican policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, union busting, and free trade.”

He urged the Committee to “be bold, go big, and eliminate the vestiges of bureaucratic socialist planning that still remain in the Plan before you“.

Wulf urged the Plan to provide maps to illustrate this disparity so that what he called “the parasite class” could learn that they are dependent on the “producer class”.

The Christie Plan also drew support from a corporate lead organization called “NJ Future”.

The draft Plan now moves on to the full State Planning Commission and will undergo at least 6 public hearings across the state.

As Wulf finished and provided a copy of these remarks, he made some esoteric remark that they were offered in the “spirit of the Yesmen“.

Wulf’s testimony follows:

State Plan Development Committee

November 2, 2011

Thoughts on Governor Christie’s Draft State Plan

Byll Wulf, Founder and CEO – HAYFER P.P.I.

Good morning. My name is Byll Wulf, I am CEO of HAFER PPI, that an acronym for the “Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Ayn Rand Private Policy Institute”.

My brief remarks are based on the spatial economic planning work of Walter Izard, whose work I was privileged to study in Graduate School at Cornell, in the Department of City and Regional Planning.

For the non-planner in the room, Izard integrated classical location theory and concepts of “gravity” and “friction of distance” to explain the spatial and temporal attributes of economic activity on the landscape.

In reference to Izard, I would like to suggest the addition of a map, a chart, and a strategy.

These additions would enhance the objectives of Governor Christie’s Executive Order #78, provide a firm theoretical foundation, and a transparent and accessible methodology to elucidate the policy objectives of the Christie Plan.

A chart depicting the Genie curve for this distribution of this income data – in concert with wealth concentration mapping – would promote transparency and celebrate the success of 3 decades of policy initiatives.

At the same time, it would remind the parasites that they depend on the producers.

Instead, we note that the economic data suggest that strategic private investments in public officials has yields tremendous returns on investment.

Political donation data are available, and can be supplemented by voluntary disclosures not required under the US Supreme Court’s “Citizens United” decision.

NJ must celebrate, publicize, and market these impressive results that flow from Republican policies of privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, union busting, and free trade.

These fabulous economic results would not have occurred without strategic private investments in public officials.

By demonstrating the HUGE ROI of private investments, NJ can enhance its leverage and attract even more private investment.

This would further bend the arc of the Genie coefficient towards even more concentrated wealth and prosperity for the producer class.

In conclusion, I urge you to be bold, go big, and eliminate the vestiges of bureaucratic socialist planning that still remain in the Plan before you.

Hey Bill, thanks for this trip down memory lane. I believe that the last time I spoke in public on the then “Interim” State Plan was on March 31, 1999, in a speech enititled “Comments on the Ineffective, Terminally Indecisive, Interim Plan.”

Here are just a few excerpts; I don’t want to detract from that fine testimony of the man from “Hayfer PPI.” But here goes:

“Never before in the conservation history of this State have so many futile words and pages, and revisions of this futility, wasted so much of our citizens’ time, energy and hopes, and delivered so little…So NJAS wants to distance itself from where the Plan stands today. We want to warn the citizens of New Jersey that they face more lost farms and forests, and more interminable legal battles in front of their local governments and state agencies, as evidenced by events in Hopewell, Pohatcong and Sparta Townships..They will continue to be stuck in traffic, face higher property tax bills, and witness the seemingly inevitable suburbanization of the State…We want to go on the record today, to state without equivocation that what is in this Plan won’t work, can’t work and is one of the greatest policy illusions ever visited upon the public in New Jersey.”

New Jersey had the chance to continue its fine tradition as the nation’s leader in land use, if it had been willing to crown the ten years plus work on the voluntary plan with protective and mandatory standards for planning areas 4 & 5, and penalties for non-complying munis. PA3 would have been an ugly fight; we wanted to save all contig. forest areas of say 150-200 acres or greater there, but PA 3 would have been the place for the final compromises with the builders, upsetting all the local Sierra Club chapters. And I think you might remember this because we had worked on that “Draft” Findinds Section for the legislation which would have put these notions into effect.

But as you know, the conservation “Old Guard,” that had pioneered with the Pinelands, went voluntary all the way with the state plan, and the state’s water and toxic pollution oriented conservation groups would not unite with us to fight the old guard on the last grand land-use battle: I’m talking about PIRG and NJ En. Federation. When I say “Old Guard,” I mean Dave Moore, Sally Dudley, Candance Ashmun, ANJEC and the NJ Conservation Foundation, those close to Helene Fenske and Chris Daggett. And of course, former Gov. Kean, who set the state planning process in motion in the 1980’s, never wanted a regulatory state plan, even as he contradictorily, it would seem, pursued a land-use Commission for the coastal zone in 1988.
To fill out the picture in the 1995-2000 years, NJ Future under Barbara Lawrence was also anti-regulatory, and it seems to me, always as decorated with those corporate logos as the NASCAR racers. Not a bad composite reflection of the larger drift of national politics, is it, kind of a centr-right alliance against further land-use regulations at the state level, although I have to say in fairness, that the Old Guard, mostly moderate Republicans, did have the dilemma of an internal fight with the then dominant forces of the hard Right within the party. You’re living that reality now too, under Governor Christie. I never maintained it was easy, but without the Old Guard’s support, it wasn’t going to happen.

My sense of urgency was driven by what I always saw was the ticking clock of development pressures, a small state caught between two major driving Metro areas, and the already huge cumulative and historical losses of farms, forests,wetlands and End. Species habitats, threatened by fragmentation even if the specific development project was done well. You can buy ten acres around a vernal pond, but if everything else around it is being developed, the water table goes, the smaller streams go, and soon the pond is not longer biologically viable.

Since I don’t know in detail what’s happened since, I can only leave your readers with my sense of where things stood when I left NJ in 2001. But I will say this, that fighting global warming has a similar sense of urgency, if the science is right: the time for a moderate set of measures – whatever the compromises would be – won’t get there in time from the timeline I’m looking at.

I’m reminded of an old dialogue of moderates versus – well – let us say more urgent directions during the old civil rights debates – going back to my freshman English course in college. What I remember was James Baldwin’s reply to something William Faulkner wrote – “Letter to the North” in 1956, with Faulkner pleading that the North still didn’t understand the South, and asking for a go slow policy on civil rights. Here is the closing paragraph from Baldwin’s reply in an essay called “Faulkner and Desegration”:

“But the time Faulkner asks for does not exist – and he is not the only Sutherner who knows it. There is never time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now.”

As it was with civil rights, so I think it is with global warming, and the economic crisis facing our nation – and beyond. My best to all the citizens of New Jersey.

And Bill, forgive me: I left Franklin Parker off the list of the “Old Guard.” The last time I saw him in NJ – I think it was at the Legislature in Trenton – he was livid – angry at me for real or imagined offenses against the prerogatives of those conservationists who were to manage “all things Pinelands.” As you know, Franklin was famous for his quiet demeanor, so I can only infer that I must have done something just awful,awful. Not really, of course.